Category: browsers

Mozilla Firefox has been the browser that has been able to take on the dominance of Internet Explorer most effectively. In its most recent metrics report, Mozilla looked into the market share numbers offered by third party studies from StatCounter, Quantcast, Net Applications and Gemius to calculate the average market share in each market.

Accordingly, we see that Firefox has just crossed the 100 million users mark in USA and 150 million users mark in Europe. Interestingly, Firefox is now used by at least 25% of users in each of the markets with Europe being the most popular market where close to 40% of users are active Firefox users.

Here are the number of Firefox users and the market share that constitutes in the market

Africa : 5.6 million (29.7%)
Asia : 68.7 million (26.6%)
Australia Oceania : 6.7 million (28.7%)
Europe : 152.7 million (39.2%)
North America : 100 million (26%)
South America : 31.7 million (31.4%)

In the past one year, the number of users accessing Facebook from their smartphone mobile browser has jumped 112%. The corresponding number for Twitter is 347%. This is interesting because this does not include the number of users accessing these social networks via mobile apps that is pretty ubiquitous on smartphones today. Also, the difference in socialk network access via mobile browser differs widely between smartphone users and feature phone users. Here are the related stats according to a study by Comscore

Percent users accessing social networks via mobile browser
Smartphones : 30.8%
Feature phone : 6.8%

Number of such users in Jan ’10
Facebook : 25.13 million
MySpace : 11.44 million
Twitter : 4.7 million

Firefox has continued to grow over the past year. You might remember that back in August, Firefox 3.5 garnered a 4.5% market share among web browsers within the first month of going live. So, that should summarize the growth path over the past year. Here is a region-wise listing of Firefox’s growth

Africa : 82%
Asia : 73%
South America : 64%
North America : 25%
Europe : 32%

Worldwide : 40%

We had earlier seen the top 10 countries for Opera Mini in terms of usage. Now, here is how the mobile web browser is growing in the various parts of the world. Here is the YoY growth in unique users in November 2009

Southeast Asia : 362%
South Asia : 206%
Africa : 176%
Latin America : 143%
East Asia : 132%
North America : 105%
Middle East : 102%
CIS : 95%
Europe : 73%

This news made me happy – Firefox has overtaken IE as the most used web browser in Germany. Right now, the lead is marginal and so it is still so much possible that Internet Explorer can claim back the top spot that it has held for over a decade. Here are the latest market share of the top web browsers in Germany

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Opera Mini is no doubt still one of the most popular browsers on the mobile phones. So how has the usage been growing? A in-house report released earlier this week notes some interesting stats

Users
Number of unique users in October ’09 : 39.6 million (155% over Oct ’08 and 11.3% over Sep ’09)

Pageviews
Number of pages viewed in October ’09 : 17.2 billion (238% over Oct ’08 and 14.8% over Sep ’09)

Data Traffic
Amount of data consumed in October ’09 : 263 million MB (233% over Oct ’08 and 16% over Sep ’09)

I’m surprised there has only been a proportional increase in data traffic assuming that there would have been a lot more 3G users in Oct 2009 than Oct 2008.

Top 10 Countries for Opera Mini
1. Russia
2. Indonesia
3. India
4. China
5. Ukraine
6. South Africa
7. United States
8. United Kingdom
9. Poland
10. Vietnam

How long before Android overtakes the iPhone? At least quite some time, if we are to go by what StatCounter statistics say. According the market share recorded by StatCounter for the month of October 2009, the iPhone market share is nearly ten times the market share of Android. Anyway, Droid could change all that. Only time will tell. Here are the mobile browser rankings according the market share for October 2009

1. Opera : 26.92%
2. iPhone(Safari) : 21.22%
3. Nokia : 20.84%
4. iTouch : 9.27%
5. Blackberry : 8.79%
6. NetFront : 3.69%
7. Android : 2.56%
8. OpenWave : 1.53%
9. Sony PSP : 1.53%

Opera claims the mini browser as the most popular mobile browser in the world. While that is debatable, here are some stats released by the company on their yeat-on-year growth:

Unique Visitors
32 million people used Opera mini in August 2009, 147% increase over August 2008.

Pageviews
13.9 billion pages were viewed in 08/09, 235% increase over 08/08.

Every users is viewing 14 pages per day on an average up from 10 pages per day a year ago.

The core strength of Firefox has been the implementation of add-ons to your browser. So, how many users have installed Firefox add-ons on their system?

Average number of users logging on to Firefox per day : 100 million
Number of pings on Firefox add-ons on the Mozilla server : 32.8 million per day

Roughly 32.8% of Firefox users have at least one add-on installed on their browser.

Opera mini’s usage has considerably grown through the vacation season possibly because more people are on the move. This does not mean they have not grown otherwise. Take a look at the stats and decide:

Number of people using Opera Mini in July 2009 : 29.1 million
– 9.9% increase from June 2009
– 145% increase from July 2008

Page views from Opera Mini in July 2009 : 12 billion
– 15.4% increase from June 2009
– 223% increase from July 2008